President
Donald Trump criticized former President Barack Obama in a series
of tweets last weekend and into Monday evening, slamming Obama
for what he characterized as a weak or nonexistent response to
Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

"Just out: The Obama Administration knew far in advance of
November 8th about election meddling by Russia. Did nothing about
it. WHY?" Trump tweeted on Friday.

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"Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016
Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on
them, not T!" he tweeted on Saturday.

And on Monday, he wrote: "The reason that President Obama did
NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling
is that he expected Clinton would win and did not want to 'rock
the boat.' ... The real story is that President Obama did NOTHING
after being informed in August about Russian meddling."

But some former Obama officials and national-security experts
sought to push back on that developing narrative as it gained
traction in the Trump administration and among its allies in
Washington and in conservative media.

They pointed to Obama's authorization of James Clapper, then the
director of national intelligence, and Jeh Johnson, the secretary
of homeland security, to release an extraordinary public
statement on October 7 acknowledging, for the first time, that
"the Russian government directed" hacks of the Democratic
National Committee and Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John
Podesta.

Obama also used the so-called red phone - a direct line between
Washington and Moscow set up during the Cold War - on October 31
to send an explicit
warning to Putin: "International law, including the law for
armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace. We will hold
Russia to those standards."

Obama debated various ways to retaliate, "including cyberattacks
on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material
that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said
could 'crater' the Russian economy,"
The Washington Post reported on Friday. Ultimately, Obama's
response was characterized as tough but measured: He expelled 35
Russian diplomats, closed two Russian compounds, and levied new,
albeit narrow, sanctions.

Ned Price, a senior director of the National Security Council and
former special adviser to Obama, said Trump was "resorting to
this playground tactic" of shifting blame for Russia's attack
"because his own actions are indefensible."

"Let's not forget, he encouraged the Russians to hack his
opponent's emails, he praised WikiLeaks - a veritable arm of
Russian intelligence - and he has repeatedly denied the
high-confidence assessment of all 17 intelligence agencies that
Russia meddled in our election," said Price, who spent over a
decade at the CIA.

On the campaign trail, Trump
repeatedly cited information stolen in Russian-led hacks and
published by WikiLeaks to criticize Clinton along the campaign
trail.

"Did you see where, on WikiLeaks, it was announced that they were
paying protestors to be violent, $1,500?" Trump said on October
31. "Did you see another one, another one came in today? This
WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove."

On November 2, he said: "Out today, WikiLeaks just came out with
a new one, just a little a while ago, it's just been shown that a
rigged system with more collusion, possibly illegal, between the
Department of Justice, the Clinton campaign, and the State
Department."

And on November 4, he said: "Boy, I love reading those
WikiLeaks."

One month later, the Trump transition team
released a statement that appeared to cast doubt on the
intelligence community's findings that Russia had meddled in the
election with the specific purpose of damaging Clinton's
candidacy and swinging voters toward Trump. The statement
referred to the CIA as "the same people that said Saddam Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction."

caption

Russian President Vladimir Putin.

source

Thomson Reuters

"I'm very glad that President Trump and his team think that we
should have done more to stop the Russians," Tom Malinowski, who
was an assistant secretary of state under Obama from 2014 to
2017, said jokingly about the current White House's recent
attempts to shift blame. "I wish they'd have warned us earlier."

Price said the administration had "one paramount objective" when
it came to responding to Russia's election meddling: "to ensure
the integrity of the most sacred element of our democracy, the
vote."

"And as we noted at the time - and as has been reaffirmed
following the transition - we have seen no evidence that the
Russians tampered with the vote tally," Price said. "We did that
through a series of private and public warnings to the Russians,
actions to sensitize election administration officials in all 50
states, and, of course, warnings to the American public starting
a full month before the election about Russia's meddling."

He added that the administration didn't get "much support from
the Republican Congress."

"Mitch McConnell, for example, in September refused to sign on to
a statement attributing the meddling to the Russians," Price said
of the Senate majority leader.

Another Obama White House official, who asked for anonymity to
speak candidly, also cited McConnell's "unwillingness to help" as
a major roadblock in the administration's efforts to retaliate.

"The Obama administration's interest in making sure the response
was bipartisan wasn't for the sake of being bipartisan," the
official said. "It was necessary because we needed the buy-in
from state and local election administrators - many of whom were
Republican partisans and/or skeptical of the federal government.
What was profoundly troubling was Senator McConnell's
unwillingness to help, only making matters worse."

The official said the Obama administration took the Russian
attack "extremely seriously." But even Malinowski, who has been
highly critical of the Trump administration's Russia policies,
said he struggled with whether the White House reacted
aggressively enough.

"Should Obama have done more? I struggle with that a little bit,"
Malinowski said.

"Like a lot of people with the benefit of hindsight, I do now
think we would have been better off as a country had we taken the
actions that ultimately were taken a bit sooner," he added. "But
I'm not certain it would have had a meaningful impact, and I
completely understand the reasons for the president's reluctance
at a moment when many people thought the greater danger was
direct interference in the electoral machinery."

caption

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson.

source

Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

Malinowski echoed Price's assertion that one of the most
important goals of Obama's response, if not the most important,
"was to maintain confidence in the electoral outcome rather than
allowing Trump and the Russians to achieve their secondary goal
of sowing mistrust in a Hillary Clinton victory."

"Obama may have been right that premature attribution and
sanctions would have fallen into the trap that Trump and Putin
were setting of preemptively accusing the elections of being
rigged," he said.

Ian Bremmer, the president of the political-risk firm Eurasia
Group, was unequivocal.

"Obama should have responded more forcefully," he said. "This was
a direct (and ultimately successful) attempt to delegitimize the
US election by a hostile external actor. If it had been at the
hands of a terrorist organization, we would have demanded drone
strikes."

Bremmer said that while he understood Obama's concerns about any
retaliation being perceived as politically motivated, "Obama's
role as commander in chief supersedes any role on the campaign.
Telling the Russians to 'cut it out' and eventually throwing some
sanctions together, linked also to harassment of US diplomats in
Moscow, was exceptionally weak tea."

Engaging in "direct cyberattacks" against the Russians, such as
taking down government sites or leaking information that would
embarrass the Kremlin, would have been a better response, Bremmer
said. According to The Post, Obama authorized the US intelligence
community to plant cyberweapons in Russia's infrastructure. But
he left it up to the Trump administration to launch them.

"Our elected president shouldn't be kicking the can on something
this important," Bremmer said. "But, to be clear, for all of
Obama's ineffective finger-wagging, that remains more than what
Trump's done, who apparently is unconcerned (or potentially even
supportive) of the Russian attacks."

Price agreed.

"The Trump administration has done nothing to bolster the
defenses we set in motion," he said. "By denying Russia's
meddling, turning a blind eye to Moscow's aggression, and seeking
to reverse the Obama administration's punitive actions, the White
House is leaving the door wide open for Moscow to return in 2018
and 2020."